Margit Bowler, a 4th year graduate student doing fieldwork in semantics in Walpri, was invited to give a talk at the Stanford Department of Linguistics on November 4th.
A short description of the talk follows:
“In this talk, I evaluate the status of degrees in Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia). I present Warlpiri data collected following Beck, et al.’s 2009 questionnaire, and show that Warlpiri lacks degrees as a primitive in its semantic ontology. I follow analyses of other degree-less languages (Washo, Bochnak 2013 and Fijian, Pearson 2009) in accounting for some potentially problematic data.
In addition to discussing degrees, I’ll also talk briefly about my fieldwork experience in central Australia, methodologies I used in collecting my degree data, and show some photos from my fieldwork site.”